The Client

Cody with Antler Hill Welding was one of my very first clients when I first finished up my schooling for graphic and web design way back in 2007. Since then, their website had not been updated. Now, way back then I had the skills necessary to build an effective and beautiful website, but as time goes on, technology advances and I continued to improve my skills – I was extremely excited for the opportunity to update one of my old builds. 

“Antler Hill Welding is an evolving and dynamic CWB welding and fabrication company that strives to provide our clients with high-quality Canadian craftsmanship and finished products.”

Conceptualize

I had a face-to-face meeting with Cody in July of 2021 – which as we all know was quite a feat and I quickly learned that he wanted a better representation of where his business was after 15 years of hard work. It was great for me as well as it allowed me an opportunity to provide a better representation of how my skills how grown as well.

The most important factor was to figure out how to organize the content in the most effective manner. As mentioned earlier, when we initially built the website Cody was just starting out – the amount of content (copy and imagery) was quite low, so this would definitely be a larger-scale project than in the past. We discussed the possibility of converting into a one-page design – to keep overall costs down – so that would be explored as well.

Create

The creative process began by pulling out the branding assets from their logo. This includes font choices, colour schemes and overall look & feel. Once I received all the content for the site (combining both new and old), organizing the layout was the next priority mainly to see if a 1-page design was plausible.

I quickly determined that Cody had far too much information to facilitate a single-page design. The increase in their business practices would require more room to properly present this information. They also had an abundance of photos taken over the years that would supply a beautiful backdrop for the site. As normal, the homepage serves as an executive summary for the rest of the site. In this case, I used it to give the most important information related to the company’s history, services and equipment.

The subpages were an opportunity to expand upon the service information and provide more images of the services that Antler Hill Welding can provide to its customers. The expansion of this information and proper image tagging creates better SEO engagement and will hopefully cause a drastic increase in the amount of traffic the new AHWS website sees.

The final component of the design was the customized header and footer sections. Providing quick access to contact information will allow AHWS’s customers to get any information they require easily.

Communicate

The final design is a drastic upgrade from their last design…and I can say that since I designed the 1st one too. It is a very modern design with clean lines and separation of information. The combination of provided and stock imagery presents a fresh and eye-catching look. Tons of buttons and call-to-action sections ensure visitors to the site will easily find the information they need or be quickly able to book their shuttle as they need it.